Google rankings can be fickle things - the search engine giant requires a fair bit from your website to keep you on, or as close to, the front page as possible. One thing that may be affecting your website’s Google ranking is your bounce rate. Specifically, your bounce rate is how fast people leave your website. Google places a high priority on solving visitor queries - if someone types a query into the search engine, Google will attempt to produce results that it feels will best serve that query. If a visitor arrives on your website and doesn’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll potentially just leave without visiting another page and this is precisely what Google doesn’t want.

There are a number of ways to try to reduce your bounce rate and therefore increase the appeal and ‘stickiness’ of your website, meaning more people are staying on your site for longer periods of time, indicating they’ve found what they’re looking for. At the simplest level, it’s important to ensure your website’s customer journey is strong and easy to navigate. Useability is key here - you should attempt to tailor your website to the specific queries you’re attempting to resolve.

We’ve written this blog to help outline some of the core places where you can try to improve your website’s bounce rate. Of course, it’s important to remember that there are no concrete ways to reduce bounce rates - people may still leave your website. However, these points should certainly help to reduce it.

Smart Formatting

Your website needs to be legible. In that sense, you should try your best to avoid walls of text. Good punctuation can help to make your writing more accessible, as well as not posting huge, endless paragraphs. Correctly using headers and subheadings can make your work more approachable, while using appropriate images in the correct place can really help to break up your text and add flow to your site.

Eliminate Long Load Times

Your bounce rate issues could be stemming from more than just your website’s content. Long load times can turn someone away from your website almost immediately - in fact, if a visitor loads up your website and finds themselves stuck on a screen, they’re incredibly likely (and reasonably so) to find their information elsewhere. In fact, 47% of customers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or less.

Include a Singular Call to Action

It’s important that your website’s visitor journey is as clear, simple and effective as can be. That’s why you need to have a singular call to action on your website, making it obvious for your visitor where they need to go. You need to think about the content you’re making and what action you want the visitor to take - it’s that control over the visitor journey that keeps the site easily navigable and makes people stick around. Although CTAs are good to have, as they help with conversions, the more you have on a single page, the more likely someone is to leave without knowing what they were meant to do - or even what you’re offering.

Optimise for Other Platforms

Optimising your website for other platforms is incredibly important for a number of reasons. People spend an enormous amount of time using a variety of different digital devices, from desktops to smartphones and everything in between. It’s key then that your website is optimised to be readable on every platform. If a website looks stunning on a desktop, but horrible and virtually illegible on a mobile device, then whoever fired it up on their phone isn’t likely to stick around. These days, when optimisation is so clearly an important aspect, having a poorly optimised website simply makes you look either lazy or uninformed.

Make Navigation King

This has been the undercurrent of this whole blog, the running theme throughout - navigation matters. Everything you do comes back to your site’s navigation and how important it is to get it right. Good navigation means people can find the answers to their queries and that’s what Google wants from you. Navigation will keep a visitor on your website until they’ve completed their action - exactly what you want.

If you need any help with reducing or understanding bounce rates on your website, get in touch with our experienced team on 01189 100 012.